Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Ever since Georgia enacted a scholarship tax credit law in 2008, individual and corporate taxpayers in the Peach State could receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits in return for contributions to nonprofit scholarship organizations—at least until the $58 million cap is reached.

Donors are eligible to receive credits starting on January 1st of each year. In 2012, the last of the credits were claimed in mid-August. The following year, donors hit the cap in May. Last year, they hit it in just three weeks. This year, all the credits were claimed within hours of becoming available on January 1st. In fact, taxpayers applied for more than $95 million in credits, $37 million more than the cap.

Scholarship families are highly satisfied. In a 2013 survey of families receiving scholarships from Georgia GOAL, 98.6% of respondents reported being “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their chosen school.

Clearly, both the demand for scholarships and the willingness of taxpayers to support scholarship students have grown far beyond what the law currently allows. It’s time to raise the cap. Georgia legislators considering pending legislation to raise the cap to $250 million should be encouraged by two additional facts. First, the best evidence suggests that the tax credit law saves money by reducing expenses by more than it reduces tax revenue. Second, two-thirds of Georgians support the scholarship tax credit law. In other words, it’s good policy and good politics.

In other states that cap the amount of scholarship tax credits available—such as Florida, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—donors consistently hit the cap each year. Two recent exceptions—New Hampshire and Alabama—highlight the adverse effects of lawsuits on fundraising. After anti–school choice activists sued to block New Hampshire’s Opportunity Scholarship law, donations dropped off precipitously because of the uncertainty about the law’s future. Fortunately, the state supreme court unanimously rejected the challenge last summer, so we should expect a significant increase in donations this year.

In Alabama, scholarship organizations raised only half as much in 2014 as they did in 2013 because of the uncertainty created by government education establishment’s legal challenge. The lawsuit is likely to meet the same end as similar lawsuits in Arizona and New Hampshire, but the plaintiffs are harming thousands of children while the case is being litigated.

The state of the world is improving. Child mortality, poverty, and violence are declining, while life expectancy, incomes, and education are increasing. While many problems remain, most indicators of human well-being are trending in the right direction—especially in the developing world.

If you are interested in a realistic look at the state of humanity, then I highly recommend that you watch this video:

That’s the text message that a mother received from her terrified child at Jewett Middle Academy in Winter Haven, Florida. But the child wasn’t describing a psychotic school shooter. It was a drill. As the local CBS affiliate reported:

Students at Jewett Middle Academy said they were terrified when police officers burst in the doors for a planned active shooter drill – but students and teachers are irked they were not told ahead of time.

Seventh-grader Lauren Marionneaux told WTVT-TV that when the officers burst into her class with an AR-15, she was in fear for her life.

“We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us,” the station quoted her as saying.

In the wake angry protests from parents, students, and teachers, school officials explained that the secrecy surrounding the drill was necessary for the students’ safety:

“Unfortunately, no one gets an advanced notice of real life emergencies,” Polk County Public Schools spokesman Jason Gearey said in an e-mailed statement to The Washington Post. “We don’t want students to be scared, but we need them to be safe.”

They don’t want students to be scared, but unannounced active shooter drill is guaranteed to scare kids. Moreover, as Lenore Skenazy points out, such drills could actually put people in danger:

Of course, the authorities neglected to notice that no one sets the school on fire to create more realistic fire drills. Nor do they drag in giant wind machines to replicate the feel of an impending tornado.

The fear that teachers might suffer heart attacks, that kids might experience psychotic breakdowns, that someone with his own weapon might shoot real bullets in defense—none of that seemed to occur to our peacekeepers. Nor did the notion that distraught parents might race frantically to the school, endangering anyone in their path.

No, these cops were so focused on the most horrific, least likely crime that nothing else mattered.

School shootings are every parent’s worst nightmare, but fortunately they are exceedingly rare. As I explained back in September, fewer than one in 10,000 schools have had a shooting in the last two years, and fewer than one out of every 2,273,000 students per year are killed at school including all types of violence, not just shootings. By contrast, according to National Geographic, the odds of being hit by lightning in a given year is one out of 700,000.

Some experts have also questioned the efficacy of unannounced active shooter drills. In the Wall Street Journal, a former SWAT officer who conducts seminars to teach civilians how to deal with mass-shooting scenarios panned the idea: “There ends up being zero learning going on because everyone is upset that you’ve scared the crap out of them.” The Journal also reported several other instances of drills gone awry. In one drill at a nursing home, a police officer posing as an armed intruder forced a nurse into an empty room at gunpoint where “she tearfully begged for her life.” She was so traumatized that she quit her job. Other drills also left civilians traumatized or even physically injured:

The confusion that sometimes ensues during drills also can have unintended consequences. In March, a teacher in Boardman, Ohio, filed a lawsuit against local police and school officials, claiming he was unexpectedly tackled by a police officer during a drill at a high school, seriously injuring his hip and shoulder.

Jesse McClain, 60 years old, had volunteered to participate and was playing the role of a “panicked parent” when the officer tackled him without warning, his lawyer, John O’Neil, said. Boardman Township’s police chief and the superintendent of the town’s school district declined to comment on the incident, citing the lawsuit.

In Florida, a woman filed a complaint in March with state officials on behalf of her sister, a Fort Walton Beach nurse, over a drill at an Okaloosa County Health Department office. According to the complaint, employees weren’t informed about the drill, which involved a police officer firing blanks, and many were “hysterical, crying and shouting.”

As with fires and other hazards, it is important for schools to be prepared for an emergency. But policymakers must keep things in perspective. Keeping kids safe does not require terrifying them.

This morning NPR published an interview with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the presumptive next chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Unfortunately, if you were hoping the new GOP Senate would move decisively in the right direction on education, you may be disappointed. While the interview suggests we could see a moderate move in the right direction at the k-12 level, there is little reason for hope in higher or early childhood education.

For elementary and secondary education Alexander certainly says the right thing – the states should be in charge – and it is better that federal funds be block granted with few rules attached than delivered via numerous, micromanaged streams. So he is moving in the right direction when he says under a Republican plan, “Tennessee, Texas or New York would decide what the academic standards would be, what the curriculum would be, what to do about failing schools and how to evaluate teachers.” His general inclination is also right when he says he wants to “give states the option — not mandate — to take federal dollars and let those dollars follow children to the schools they attend.” Empowering parents beats simply feeding government monopoly schools.

Unfortunately, moving somewhat in the right direction isn’t the same as doing the clearly right thing. The Constitution does not allow federal funding of education (outside of D.C. and federal installations), nor does the record indicate that federal funding is educationally effective. The feds should therefore get out of education, including abandoning plans to provide private school choice, which if voucherized would eventually deliver stultifying federal rules and regulations to private schools nationwide.

Alas, things only go downhill in the interview after tackling k-12.

On higher education, as I feared, Alexander gives no indication he will do what must be done to address colossal waste and crippling price inflation: significantly reduce student aid. Indeed, what he seems most intent on doing is simplifying the Federal Application for Federal Student Aid, which makes sense from a paperwork-reduction standpoint but might actually lead to more aid flowing from Washington as more people complete aid applications. At least, though, Alexander recognizes the danger of the federal government trying to rate all of the nation’s postsecondary institutions, ranging from “Nashville Auto-Diesel College…[to] Harvard.”

And then there is pre-kindergarten. Again, Alexander rightly warns about federal micromanagement, but he seems to fully accept that Washington should be spending tens-of-billions of dollars on pre-k. Indeed, he states that, “The question is not whether early childhood education is a good idea. It’s how best to encourage it.” But the question absolutely is – or at least should be – whether early childhood education is a good idea. As the Cato Policy Analysis published last month by George Mason University professor David J. Armor made abundantly clear, the pre-k research simply does not support the conclusion that early childhood programs work, and talking like it is a settled issue does not make it so.

Based on this one interview, the good news is that Senate Republicans might try to make horrible federal education policy a little bit better. The bad news is that something made a little less horrible is still awfully bad.

BEIJING—China’s university system is growing. However, the People’s Republic of China still lags behind the U.S. and other Western nations. Chinese students increasingly are heading to America for higher education.

While recently playing tourist in Beijing I spoke to a number of young Chinese. They were bright and inquisitive, ambitious and nationalistic. They worried about finding good jobs and were irritated by government restrictions on their freedom.

Beijing’s global influence depends upon domestic economic growth and political stability. And that ultimately depends upon China’s young.

The PRC’s university students today are most likely to become the country’s leaders tomorrow. The number of college graduates has increased to seven million, a four-fold jump over the last decade.

While the number of universities in China is growing, few have national, let alone international, reputations. Undoubtedly that will change over time. Today, however, competition for the few available spots at top schools is extraordinary.

For instance, Peking and Tsinghua Universities are the only Chinese universities among the world’s top 100. They have space only for 6000 new students a year.

Obviously, far more Chinese students could succeed, indeed thrive, at fine universities. So more than 400,000 young Chinese are heading abroad every year.

Last week Slate published a misinformed piece on Sweden’s school choice program and what we can learn from it. The errors of fact and logic are glaring. Apparently, they don’t have multiple layers of fact checking over there, so I decided to lend a hand and correct the record at Education Next.

Here’s a snippet:

First, [Slate] claims that “more Swedish students go to privately run (and mostly for-profit) schools than in any other developed country on earth.” In fact, neither of these claims is true. Taking the parenthetical claim first, according to the most recent data of which I am aware (from 2012), the majority of Swedish private schools are non-profit (in Swedish, “Ideella”).

As for overall private sector enrollment among industrialized countries, we can consult the OECD, an association of 34 industrialized nations that administers the PISA test:

“On average across OECD countries… 14% of students attend government-dependent [i.e., gov’t-funded] private schools…. In Sweden, the share of students in private schools increased significantly over the past decade from 4% in 2003 to 14% in 2012…. This brings the share of students in private schools close to the OECD average.”

Activists in Florida found a way to torture the state’s education spending data to make appear as though Florida is 50th in education spending. The only catch is that their rather unconventional method ranks Washington D.C. as 51st, despite the fact that D.C. spends nearly $30,000 per pupil, putting it in first place for spending per pupil according to the U.S. Census Bureau (page 11, table 11).

How did they accomplish this literally unbelievable statistical feat? As Patrick Gibbons explains at RedefinED, the activists have inappropriately seized on the U.S. Census Bureau’s “education revenues per $1,000 of personal income” figure. Holding all else constant, Florida could improve its ranking using that figure either by spending more on education or by its citizens becoming poorer. Gibbons crunched the numbers to see what it would take to put Florida in 24th place, just above the median, without increasing spending:

To reach the “above average” point on the spending-per-income statistic, Florida would need education revenues of $49.15 per $1,000 of personal income. Without spending a dime more, or less, on education, Florida could boost its ranking to 24th in the nation if its collective income simply shrank by 26 percent.

Florida would become THE POOREST state in the U.S., but we would have above-average education spending – at least according to this misleading metric. Something tells me nobody will be happy with those results.

Embedded in the activists’ use of this figure is the odd notion that it costs more to educate students from wealthier states than students from poorer states. Indeed, if every state had exactly the same “education revenues per $1,000 of personal income” then rich states would far outspend poor states, yet I suspect that the activists citing this figure would not be pleased.